Social Studies Standards

In October 2014 the Kentucky Board of Education did an initial reading of a very problematic revision to Kentucky's public school social studies standards. Reactions have been strong and generally negative.

The squabble started in the Kentucky Board of Education’s October 7, 2014 meeting when a proposed revision to the social studies standards was severely criticized by Kentucky’s History Teacher of the Year, Donnie Wilkerson. Wilkerson aggressively charged the proposal was “devoid” of content and also ignored the best research on teaching. Adding more fuel to the fire, Wilkerson also said the first group of teachers assembled to create the revision was disbanded by the Kentucky Department of Education when those teachers would not go along with the very poor approach to social studies that the department’s staff favored.

In addition, Bluegrass Institute’s staff education analyst Richard Innes located the state’s Kentucky Core Academic Standards for June 2013, which contain the state’s current social studies standards. Innes looked for a few keywords and concepts in the current standards that were missing in the new ones. Some of those omissions are really disturbing.

However, the revision didn’t seem very different from the one presented to the Kentucky Board of Education back in October 2014. Teacher Donnie Wilkerson confirmed that the changes in the new, March 2015 document were minor.

The department’s staff had added something to the mix, however, called “Considerations for Curriculum Development.” These appear to be nothing more than suggestion lists of things that social studies teachers might choose to cover in their classes. The CCDs, as they are being called, are not mandatory and won’t be used to create the new social studies tests. In essence, as far as the standards are concerned, the CCDs don’t exist and many students in Kentucky will probably not be exposed to these outside-of-the-standards concepts. The CCDs mostly look like a smoke screen to cover the fact that the March 2015 version of the social studies standards revision remains devoid of content.

However, until a news release came from the department on August 4, 2015, it looked like the staff at the Kentucky Department of Education was not getting the message; Kentuckians want real, high quality social studies standards like those in Massachusetts. This news release indicates the department is now open to well-supported suggestions to revise, not just refine, the standards.

So, the general public is going to get another chance to tell our state’s educators that eliminating things like all references to every war this nation ever fought is not acceptable in the standards that will drive what our kids learn about history during their public school years.